


The Tomb of Raithwall

by Rahmi



Series: A New World Born [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: M/M, Romance Novel, The Tomb of Raithwall, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-01
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-07 13:27:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1120382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rahmi/pseuds/Rahmi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanderings around Ivalice: The Tomb of Raithwall. Alternate universe to other fics. Oil and fire spells do NOT mix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"Hold still!" Balthier barks. "Stop wriggling."

Vaan screws up his face like a sulky child. "I can do it myself," he mutters, making another attempt for Balthier's filthy handkerchief.

"Of course you can. You certainly did a good enough job of it the first time around, now didn't you?" He scrubs at a particularly stubborn smear of oil on the boy's cheek, careful of the new pink skin, and sends Vaan a thoroughly unimpressed look.

It'd shaved years off his life, turning to avoid the zombie's fire spell only to see a startled Vaan literally _go up in flames._ The water spell Fran had spent an entire evening drumming into both his and the idiot's skulls in that first weary, waterless trek across the Estersand had been the only thing that kept the boy from being a flambéed meal for the dead.

As it is, Vaan is soaking wet, shaking and covered _still_ in a massive quantity of oil in this underground tomb. There's also the small matter of him being pinned to a wall with Balthier crowded between his knees, but, really, that is just to keep the churl stationary.

"I didn't know _that_ would happen!" Vaan protests.

His handkerchief is so sodden it's leaving streaks of watery oil in its wake. Balthier pauses a moment to admire a particularly fetching rainbow smear on Vaan's chest before he drops the soiled linen and digs among his pouches for a fresh one. "Surely you've played with oil and fire before, Vaan?" he asks, genuinely curious.

Vaan gives him a strange look. "No," he says, "Why would anybody want to play with fire and oil? That's stupid. There's better stuff to do than sitting around setting things on fire." He makes another half-hearted swipe for the new handkerchief, which Balthier keeps out of his reach by the simple expedient of holding it over the boy's head.

"I suppose these 'better things to do' didn't involve learning what happened when one mixed oil with fire?" If his fingers catch and linger on the boy's nipples through the fine, thin cloth, well. They've already established that Vaan's something of an incognizant fool.

The grin Vaan gives him is two parts self-satisfied and one part pure coquettish charm. "Nah," he says. "But they were a lot more fun."

Balthier refrains from blinking stupidly at the damnable boy's open smile and makes a noise of agreement. "There are things far more entertaining, I'll give you that."

While Vaan's busy smiling up at him, Balthier switches his handkerchief to his other hand and reaches out.

Balthier gets a grip on the slick blond hair and wrenches the boy's head to the side amid loud and pointed protests. There's still a bit of oil clinging stubbornly to the curve of Vaan's neck, dripping black into the hollow between his collarbones.

He raises his eyes to the low hanging ceiling for a moment in a plea for the strength and fortitude _not_ to pounce on what amounts to little more than a dirty orphan in a dead king's tomb. It's simply unseemly.

"I'd rather not be forced to explain to Penelo how you came to ruin your pretty face while under my care," he tells Vaan.

Vaan's nose wrinkles. "What?" he asks.

He obediently leans his head back to allow Balthier better access to his throat and Balthier most certainly does not think about leaning forward to lick just there. Vaan's filthy, for one, covered in the remains of the Tallow he'd _insisted_ on carving up with that new sword he'd almost killed himself getting, and he stinks more than a little of the unlucky undead he'd pried his current armor off of two rooms back.

For another, Balthier has _lauded_ self control, dammit, and he can refrain from seducing a clueless, graceless, tactless sky pirate aspirant.

Not that Vaan is particularly helping in this matter, leaning back on his hands and offering his chest up to Balthier's questing hands and, clearly, no one has ever taught the boy not to let relative strangers grope him in the name of first aid.

"You think I'm pretty?" Vaan asks after a few seconds. He's scowling up at the ceiling when Balthier tears his eyes away from the tantalizing stretch of dirty skin.

Oh, how far his tastes have fallen. Was a time he wouldn't have looked twice at this dirty street hume, pretty, round Dalmascan face and all. He'd had decidedly less plebian tastes. "Pleasing enough," he tells Vaan. How his father would laugh to see him now.

"What about handsome?" Vaan presses. He picks at a spot of oil Balthier hasn't got to yet, his fingers painting slick trails on his desert dark skin and Balthier has to heave a sigh of absolute misery because, honestly. There wasn't a soul alive who could be this _imbecilic_ and live, was there?

"Please," Balthier says, "Handsome is for the leading man. The damsel in distress is merely 'pretty.' Not as pretty as the actual princess, certainly," that's a lie, if he were to be strictly truthful; Ashe is surprisingly plain for the princess of such a beautiful people, "But fetching just the same."

" _Damsel in distress?_ "

Balthier raises one eyebrow, silently daring Vaan to protest. _He_ certainly hadn't been the one to require assistance against the Urutan-Yensa, nor had he been the one extracted, half-dead and unconscious, from the cold embrace of a lich. The boy was a trouble magnet, which, while a stroke of luck for the rest of the party, was rather unpleasant for the Rabanastran himself.

He makes another pass over dark skin with his sodden handkerchief while he waits for Vaan to think of something else to say.

"Well, thanks, I guess," he says, grudgingly. "For the compliment. Don't say it again, okay? Especially not in front of Penelo."

Reminded of the boy's absent perhaps lover, Balthier clears his throat and looks down at the skin he's been scoring clean. There's still a trace or three of oil on Vaan, but he's confidant that remainder won't cause him to flame as merrily as the tallows they'd been massacring an hour ago.

He drops the handkerchief and backs away from Vaan before he can do anything unbefitting of a leading man. Such as beg. Or pin a brainless idiot to a wall and kiss him senseless while the rest of the party was resting just outside the room and there might or might not have been a horde of undead starting to peak impatiently around doorless hallways.

"You're clean," Balthier announces.

Vaan stares up at him from the floor. "That's it?" he asks.

"I would think you'd be glad to be done with the experience," Balthier says, "You certainly complained enough."

Vaan stretches and tugs his newly acquired armor back into place, squinting up at Balthier. "Really? That's it? Penelo said..." he trails off.

"And what did your intrepid maiden friend have to say about any of this?"

The boy shrugs again. He pulls uncomfortably at the recently purloined shirt; Balthier can see festering bits of flesh still wriggling on it and knows he is lost when even _that_ does not make his libido lie down and admit defeat.

The rather fetching blush starting to work its way down from the boys cheeks to his throat is not helping in the slightest.

Balthier tilts his head to the side and motions with one hand to hurry along the forthcoming explanation. "I'm waiting," he says when the boy just goes progressively redder.

"Nothin'," Vaan finally says, heaving himself to his feet. He's particularly graceless about it all, stumbling into the wall and muttering something nasty under his breath before he catches himself. "She's just being a weird girl, okay?"

"That was remarkably unenlightening," Balthier informs him dryly.

"She said some stuff and I thought..." Vaan trails off and darts a glance up at him through sinfully long lashes. "Never mind, c'mon, I wanna go kill some stuff. Gotta try out this new sword," and he bends down to scoop up said sword.

"None of that," Balthier says chidingly. He places his hands on his hips to keep them from reaching out for the boy and watches Vaan's fingers spin 'round the handle of his weapon until he catches the rather lewd thoughts running through his mind.

Nimble thief fingers had to be good in bed, now didn't they?

"Penelo reads too many of those ten gil novels." Vaan twirls his sword once more before sliding it into his makeshift scabbard. "Just forget it, okay? I'll tell her she's crazy when we catch up."

It takes a moment or two for his flushed mind to spit out exactly _what_ ten gil novels usually deal with (as opposed to the more regular five gil travesties, with the big breasted sighing maidens and the simpering dark haired fools on the cover). He lets the information sink in and eyes the back of Vaan's blond head as the imbecile scratches irritably at his skin.

The churl simply has to be joking. Balthier prides himself on his powers of observation, dammit, and he'd have _known_ if something had been on offer. "Are you _jesting_?" Balthier asks.

Vaan turns around to blink at him. "No?" he says. "Why're you still back there? C'mon, let's go."

"Just a moment," Balthier says, holding up one finger. "Am I to understand that you are considering acts Penelo has read in-"

"The Sky Pirate and His Eunuch," Vaan supplies helpfully.

"Yes, thank you. You are contemplating acts from the Sky Pirate and His Eunuch with myself?"

"No," Vaan says. Balthier feels himself deflate and thinks that he'd better stop staring then, hadn't he? "That'd be dumb. I'm not a eunuch. But Penelo said that she thought you might want to and I kind of want to only I think you don't really want to. So let's go kill stuff." He turns away.

Balthier likes to think that he's not altogether responsible for his next actions.

Vaan makes a very surprising noise when Balthier grabs him. Fairly high pitched, for a male, and Balthier makes a mental note to tease him about puberty later, then mentally scratches that particular thought out with a tiny shudder. Seventeen was Dalmascan legal, dammit, and he was going to enjoy it without feeling like a degenerate.

"A sky pirate," he tells Vaan grandly, backing him up until he's once again leaning against the chill crumbling wall, "Has no need of subtly. Next time, just ask."

"I wasn't being subtle!" Vaan presses one hand to Balthier's chest and pushes, scowling up at him. "Did you really think I'd let just anybody grope me like that?" he asks.

"Well, no." Balthier ducks his head to drift his lips across the boy's forehead, for it's the cleanest part of him and he honestly has no desire to bed Vaan in the middle of all this crumbling grandeur. Or, a bit of desire, but that desire was rapidly waning beneath the combined smell of undead flesh and gore. "I thought, and rightly so, that you are a dimwit."

Vaan's forehead wrinkles under Balthier's mouth. "You're the only idiot here," he huffs. "Took you _forever._ "

Balthier will admit, in the privacy of his own mind, that if he had been at a hundred percent and _not_ frustrated from watching a perky ass wander through the desert for the last week, it might have donned on him sooner. However, he has appearances to maintain and he certainly can't let a street orphan insult him.

"If you hadn't shown yourself to be predisposed to both obliviousness and outright stupidity, along with a distinct lack of self-preservation, perhaps I would have known sooner."

"Whatever," Vaan says. "You're blind and Penelo was right. I owe her the next ether we find."

Their first proper kiss comes when Balthier threads an exasperated hand into the blond's untidy mop of hair, tilts that complaining mouth up, and silences it with his own. Vaan tastes more than vaguely of oil and obviously has never been taught the joy of keeping one's teeth clean, but it's a good kiss, for all of that, just wet enough and hard enough to satisfy the slow simmer of lust roiling in his stomach.

"Alright," he says, stepping back. He pulls an unsoiled handkerchief out of his pouch to wipe his mouth on and watches as Vaan simply swipes the heel of his hand across his lips. "Now we may eradicate monsters."

"I get any treasure we find," Vaan says cheerfully.

He catches Vaan's wrist when the boy slips around him, smiling huge and unsightly. "Try not to get yourself oiled again," he says.

Vaan grins. "I won't if you won't."

Balthier thinks about standing still while Vaan wipes him down, hands maybe lingering, and weighs that with the thought of soiled cuffs and a ruined shirt. Not much of a choice after all. "Not all of us are so stupid," he says.

"Quit calling me stupid. At least I know when someone's hitting on me."


	2. Salikawood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanderings around Ivalice: The Salikawood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Salikawood set in the same universe as the Raithwall fic.

Vaan still carries pocketfuls of sand wherever he goes. Balthier finds it on the _Strahl_ at the strangest times, between the strangest places. He has stepped on it with bare feet as he crosses his personal berth at night, sat in it while piloting his Lady, and slipped in it while following in Vaan's footsteps in Archades.

"Is it a good luck charm?" Balthier asks, rubbing one palm against the skin of Vaan's belly, full touch and comforting. There is yet more grit. It is easier to focus on that than on what, precisely, he is doing. "A way to keep your home with you, perhaps?"

Under the fingertips of his other hand, the hideous burn on Vaan's thigh mends enough that the boy will be able to put weight on it within the hour. They've just trekked through the Salikawood, on their way to a fool's errand in the Deadlands.

How is it that their resident intrepid pirate in training is _still_ covered in detriment from the desert?

"Don't know what you're talking about," Vaan offers. He tests out his leg with a grimace.

Balthier wipes the ruined skin and fluid from his hands with a handkerchief. If there is a faint tremor in his palms, none but Vaan are around to see it. "The accursed sand," Balthier says once he is sure his hands are as clean as they'll get without water and good Archadian soap.

"The sand? It's not just me, you know. It gets _everywhere._ " Vaan scratches lightly at the new pink skin on his thigh. He is using his ragged fingernails to peel away long flakes of burned flesh.

There is a very fascinating pile of ashes two meters away from their current position that demands Balthier's full attention. The Bomb Queen they slew was full of wonderful surprises, even after death. "I daresay everyone else manages to _bathe_ on occasion."

"I scrubbed down two days ago," Vaan protests. There is a sound not unlike a zombie falling to pieces and Vaan lets out a long sigh. "There, I'm done. You can look at me again."

"You missed multiple spots," Balthier says.

Vaan's face scrunches as he inspects his thigh again.

"Dirt, Vaan, not dead skin."

Vaan shrugs one shoulder before he leans back on both of his hands. His face is still twisted slightly in pain, his movements slightly jerky. It had been… much closer than Balthier is comfortable contemplating.

Fran is scouting ahead with the rest of their party, checking for more ill surprises. They can't afford to be caught flat footed like this if they are to travel the Deadlands.

"We gotta stop fighting elemental monsters," Vaan sighs.

Balthier reaches out to touch the tips of his sun-bleached hair. It's dry and brittle, ragged and abused from too long in the field and one too many close calls with a fire spell gone rogue. It is, of course, also full of sand.

Vaan leans into his hand and Balthier finds he does not regret the sand and blood beneath his cracked nails.

"Refrain from allowing monsters to set your person alight again, if you please," Balthier says as lightly as he can. "I'm growing to detest the smell of you broiling."

"At least there was no oil involved this time."

**Author's Note:**

> Handkerchief: Removes Oil from one target.  
> You can get various chest armor and headpieces from zombie type enemies in the Tomb.


End file.
